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Canvas/ New MTC Artistic Director
Peter Craven
March 7, 2011
A designer, an actor, a writer and now a festival director are running some of the country's top theatre
companies. It's a trend that undervalues the virtues of the well-made play.
IT WAS a shock to hear on February 24 that Brett Sheehy, currently director of the Melbourne Festival, is to be
the new head of the Melbourne Theatre Company. It raises fears that the MTC will lose its commitment to
traditional theatre and it also raises the question of why the choice was not a hands-on theatre practitioner,
someone with a record in play directing.
One of the front runners for the MTC position was rumoured to be Kate Cherry, artistic director of Black Swan
Theatre in Perth. Cherry is famous for her productions of such plays as Hannie Rayson's Life after George and
Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. When you see a Kate Cherry production, such as her 2007 version of
Arthur Miller's All My Sons with John Stanton and Janet Andrewartha, you sense what the play actually is rather
than how it can be subverted and rejigged.
The notion of straightforward interpretation is admittedly heavily contested in Australian theatre, which is one
reason why Sheehy's appointment has raised eyebrows.
The choice was immediately applauded by the departing executive producer of the Malthouse Theatre, Stephen
Armstrong, who said the MTC's future would be ''quite distinct from its past'' and involve ''different people'' doing
a ''different kind of work''. In practice, this could be good or bad, but the lurch of the Malthouse towards metatheatre and postmodern song-and-dance under Michael Kantor and Armstrong suggests the risks of Sheehy's
appointment. The Malthouse did some splendid things - importing Neil Armfield to direct Geoffrey Rush in Exit the
King - but glories like this do not make up for a string of unhappy productions done in defiance of the idea of the
well-made play.
One of the competing orthodoxies is that a form of meta-theatre, where the words of the play are simply one of a
range of subsidiary elements, is the real future of the theatre. And it's alarming to think that if you wanted a
theatre practice that was avant-garde, postmodern, gesticulatory and opposed to the literary, then your best bet
might be Brett Sheehy, the man who brought us the pyrotechnics of Robert Lepage's The Blue Dragon, and the
re-enactment of a John Cassavetes film by a Dutch group armed with video, the production where the scenery
replaced the actors.
This appointment is remarkably consonant with a world where the recently appointed head of Belvoir Theatre in
Sydney, Ralph Myers, is a designer and where the wing of the Sydney Theatre Company most articulately
represented by Tom Wright is ambivalent about the viability of what gets referred to as text-based drama.
None of this is to deny that the STC with Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton (both of whom direct, though neither
is primarily a director) is the theatre company that makes the running in this country.
Of course the STC can be as classical as the Liv Ullmann/ Blanchett Streetcar, and the MTC can be boringly
staid. But if the MTC is to compete with the STC, straight as well as progressive, why choose a festival director
who has shown a marked preference for the margins and no man's lands between the arts? The whole thrust of
his recent festivals encourages the belief that traditional theatre is the lame duck cousin of stage work where
dance and mime and postmodern fusion are all the go.
What about all the applications for the MTC from overseas? I don't know who they were, but does anyone who
has seen the work of Ed Hall, whose all-male Shakespeare company, Propeller, appeared in Perth a few years
ago, seriously imagine that he wouldn't shake up the MTC? Has anyone pondered the practice of some of the
older Australian expatriate directors such as Elijah Moshinsky or Michael Blakemore? You would not have to
rediscover the wheel in a free-for-all of meta-theatre to invigorate the MTC. You would just have to be very good
at putting on classic and modern plays.
It's said that the MTC board was interested in Sheehy's potential for theatrical importing and exporting. With a
company that has the loyalty of Geoffrey Rush that could be a good thing. But let's remember that the Blanchetts
and Rushes simply need sensitive fine-tuners of their talents and directors who respect a dramatist's vision.
If we're looking for light in the darkness, the fact that as Sydney Festival director Sheehy brought us Ian McKellen
in Strindberg's Dance of Death is some encouragement.
We have to pray that Sheehy renounces the smoke and mirrors of postmodern moves and returns to a faith in the
play as the thing.